The entrepreneurial legacy of Peter Norton never anticipated a harrowing narrative nearly three and half decades after its inception.
The entity and industry commercialized by Norton, known as cybersecurity, was unveiled in 1990 for businesses and consumers, as the founder of the Norton brand won the race to sell the nightmare that organizations and individuals were at the whim of diabolical computer hackers over-caffeinated with Jolt cola backing the ingestion of two lines of cocaine, prompted a financial revolution, the aftermath of which left suburbanites wallowing in fear of their porn collection hijacked and the return pending intense negotiation sessions with the savant teenager using the screen name of Vnum666.
Big Tech consortium Symantec acquired Norton 34 years ago and changed forever changed the landscape software sentries protecting networks and computers.
While Norton perfected the process of eliciting fear of attacks on a PC, providing royalties to actual criminal hackers to spare his customers, and generating billions of dollars, the digital realm through the infusion of global telecom suddenly became ingrained in nearly every aspect of life, and the stakes increased exponentially. Cybersecurity had to evolve for the sake of the near future of civilization as analogue infrastructure gravitated to the computing, but at what risks and at what cost for protecting intellectual property and personal data?
Fast forward the documented stream of history ahead into the Summer 2024, and the blunder of electronic security giant CrowdStrike is at the forefront of contemporary global crises, as the historically flawed update distributed to companies and customers was a horrific preview as to how the reliance on software does not necessarily equate to reliability or stability as chaos is merely a click or a swipe away from a worldwide disaster.
A month after the near digital extinction event sparked by erroneous CrowdStrike update that affected worldwide markets, travel, logistics, and left billions of end-users unable to access their accounts and susceptible to fraud, the lingering effects of the monumental mishap are still apparent and disturbing. The preventable incident paints the blatant and glaring obvious that the reliance on electronic supersystems present a major challenge in diversification that prevent future cyber catastrophes, as the indifference to the foreboding is omnipresent. Lost within the volatility of the disaster is the stock of CrowdStrike has decreased by a whopping 35% since the release of the flawed software update. Wall Street is evidently not impressed by the gesture that is akin to the bureaucratic debauchery of an Olympics gymnastics medal scandal.
As the Nuclear Age has segued to the daunting density of the initial lifecycle of the Information Age, patience is a consequence of anticipation and exemplified by the :15 second attention span that now looms and does not practice age discrimination, though at least the Boomers and Gen X at least display a level of cognizance repels the fundamental properties of instant gratification. While the pursuit of ingenuity mounts, the innovators tend to release before they think, and the resulting conundrum of overengineering leads to a CrowdStrike or Boeing 737-max fiasco of complex technology that disconcertingly baffles the creators, not to mention the end-users. Spanning Silicon Valley to traditional manufacturing, eloquence has succumbed to the decadence of machine learning and competency has become a premium. The irony is that maligned digital hackers and their “Darwinistic” approach to practicing Turing-based Natural Selection are needed to maintain the speed limit of a domain outside of the jurisdiction dictating the ebb and flow and the pratfalls of everyday life and reality.
The addiction and fear-mongering surrounding cybersecurity has led to a threshold of integration where removing the tendrils and neural components of the framework could damage networks, servers, and operating systems. Similar to a weed in symbiosis with an endemic landscape, a surgical separation from the host could be fatal.
Peter Norton had a vision for marketplace sustainability based on predatory tenets, and the digital environment now is bound by a trillion dollar a year paradox funding a precarious future.